WHY AM I CALLED PERIWINKLE?

Our intelligent and kindly bookseller - 'Ross at the Bookshop' is how he invariably announces himself when he telephones - agreed the other day that he would take some copies of my book 'The Ill-Fated Battalion' to complement his displays of other books on the First World War.   I took them down to him earlier in the week.
      The Ill-Fated Battalion deals with the twin tragedies of the 1,000 men and boys of the 7th Battalion, The Royal Scots, in the summer of 1915 first at Quintinshill near Gretna, where the train in which they were travelling ran into another train standing on the same line, and then at Gallipoli where they became cannon, or rather machine gun, fodder, displaying all the while great bravery and spirit.  I began to write this story in 1983 on an old manual typewriter but concluded, by the time I had got to the end, that it was horribly overwritten and therefore turgid despite the fascinating story, culled mainly from contemporary newspapers retrieved from the bowels of the British Museum Newspaper Library at Colindale.  So I put the book away and put the effort down to experience.
     But with the anniversary of the First World War - and indeed the anniversary of the 1915 railway accident itself - looming, I thought I should take another look at the material and rewrite the book on a computer which is what I did.  I published it myself last year through Completely Novel.
      People who have read it have been kind enough to say that they like it, except for one individual who gave it a very dusty review on Amazon on the sole grounds as far as I could make out that I had omitted reference to some equally compelling Gallipoli bravery by another regiment involved in the same operation.  Still, there's no pleasing some folk as we all know.  We'll see how Ross makes out selling it to his patrons.
     It is hard, though, to drift into Ross' shop without coming away with a purchase and a displayed paperback caught my eye.  The book's author was Eric 'Winkle' Brown and it was his account of his life as a test and experimental pilot during the war years and afterwards.  He is credited by the Guinness Book of Records with having flown more types of aeroplanes than anyone else, ever:  four hundred and eighty seven types in all, including many German, Italian and Japanese planes captured at the end of the Second World War.  Many of these I had never heard of.
    But it was the nickname 'Winkle' that intrigued me - for my own father who had also been in the Royal Air Force during the war used to call me by the same name: 'Winkle' or 'Wingle'  (the two sound very similar); and sometimes 'Wingle Wangle,' and sometimes again 'Periwinkle.'
     I don't think I ever asked him whence the name came; I just accepted it.   I had thought - because he liked to read Edward Lear's poems to me - that it came from 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat' which goes.....

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

The Quangle Wangle sat,

But his face you could not see,

On account of his Beaver Hat.

For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide,

With ribbons and bibbons on every side

And bells and buttons and loops and lace,

So that nobody ever could see his face

Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

This gets us to 'Wangle' but from 'Quangle' to 'Wingle' is rather a jump so I wondered if my father might have picked up this nickname for me from Eric Brown, the author of this book whose purchase I was now contemplating.  

     What made this seem more possible was that I could read from the blurb that Eric Brown was only six months older than my father.  More than this they both were attending schools in Edinburgh at the same time, he the Academy and Eric Brown the Royal High School. Maybe they had met in Edinburgh, or maybe they had met sometime during the war or afterwards.  Or maybe, of course, not.

       I have since learned that Eric Brown's nickname was short for 'Periwinkle' and Wikipedia suggests he was thus dubbed by his service colleagues on account of his small stature. (Among other things a periwinkle is a small marine snail). This seems improbable to me. Periwinkle is a feminine name; moreover why call anyone after a snail? No, I feel sure there must be some common connection - a character in a film perhaps.  Or it might be an Edinburgh appellation or something to do with aeroplanes or indeed both. 

     I suppose it is possible that he had to be 'winkled' out of his cockpit on a couple of occasions when the aircraft he was flying crash-landed and so got the name that way with the idea that of pulling a short body out of a carapace of cockpit.  Maybe several airmen were so dubbed. Maybe the usage was common.  Maybe I had to be 'winkled' out of the cosiness of my mother's womb.  She always said giving birth to my head was not the problem but my shoulders got stuck.   I was born in Edinburgh and lived there long enough to have acquired this nickname if the nickname were local.   

     The matter is intriguing me now, so I would welcome any ideas anyone may have.

Meanwhile I can vouch for Eric 'Winkle' Brown's book which is most exciting if you like aeroplanes as I once did and it has rekindled a lost period in my life when I learned to fly (one of my few claims to fame is that I learned to fly a plane before learning to drive a car and all courtesy of the Air Ministry as I think the Ministry of Defence then wasn't).  

     But here's a funny thing:  I used to suffer from terrible and embarrassing air sickness, until I was actually flying the plane myself.  Then I could throw it about the sky without feeling the least queasiness.  Now why should that be?